Paul Graham's Participatory Narcissism

OK, now that I actually finished reading the post:

Thanks for writing this, Jeff! This captures my reaction to the offensive PG article perfectly. Here’s hoping your own blog doesn’t eventually descend into the same participatory narcissism, especially now that you’re a Founder. =)

Allow me to over-condense your post as glibly and snidely as lex99 did:

“I claim to respect Paul Graham. But he made a cutting analogy about modern working conditions that I found insulting simply because I consider myself an exception to his generalization. So I’m going to ignore or misstate his main points and focus on that one comparison. And because he speaks from his own experiences and unique point of view, that means he’s self-absorbed and irrelevant. Yeah. I’m so over him.”

Your use of the caged monkey photo highlights how much you misread PG’s analogy. That cage looks like hell. But modern zoos usually have more lush accommodations than that (mostly thanks to constant pressure from animal rights groups), particularly for lions, which is what PG zeroed in on. Zoo lions typically live in something akin to paddocks – enclosed areas filled with fake wilderness, where the lions can roam around a bit and have a taste of the illusion of freedom. It makes the lions a bit happier and makes for a better show for the tourists.

But lions, like humans, are apex predators. Lions are meant (in an evolutionary or creationist sense, take your pick) to roam free in small packs and be the masters of vast domains. PG argues that humans are subject to a similar evolutionary pressure, applied in this case to working conditions: restricting a person’s freedom with the machinery of a vast organizational hierarchy greatly limits their potential. As such, he believes it is as counterproductive and unnatural as forcing a lion to live in a zoo.

As to PG’s apparent false dichotomy between startups and crappy jobs, I think that’s more a side effect of his own pool of anecdotal experience rather than a deliberate attempt to plug his company. As someone who constantly works with startups, I think he has subconsciously divided the world into startups and non-startups, and much of the non-startup world is made up of big corporations employing many thousands of Dilberts. But on the other hand, he specifically mentions that you can get more freedom without founding a startup. So that blows the accusation of false dichotomy right there. And yes, there are lucky people like yourself who find enough freedom, even as a cog in a vast machine, to still find some fulfillment. Most are not that lucky.

PG is simply pointing out a trend that he has encountered: as company size increases, the proportion of enjoyable, fulfilled employees decreases. His post attempts to explain the symptoms with a colorful analogy, and then analyze the root causes of that trend. The fact that you are an outlier in his analysis does not necessarily negate the existence of the trend, nor is it a reason to be insulted, nor to relegate both the argument and the man himself to narcissistic irrelevance.

I have a different take on this. I think his blog is simple marketing. Of course he wants young, smart, confident engineers to consider founding a startup. He’ll tell as many as he can to do so. His business depends on it.

Without even having finished this, I’d like to say: you beat me to this idea.

I was just getting started with an essay, Paul Graham style, asking the master to take a little break from YC to return to essays. I think he’s left his true calling and found himself wrapped up in something good, but less good.

Good stuff, Jeff!

Paul is definitely guilty of over-generalization. In 2000, I left a company of 300+ employees to become employee #3 at a web startup. It was one of the most frustrating and educational experiences I have ever had. Unfortunately, the education I received was about people – I never got the chance to learn anything new related to software development.

The startup was an almost stereotypical example of a “dot-bomb”, including an ego-maniacal VC funder that insisted on control of the architecture, and made decisions solely on how impressive it might look to the theoretical entity that would soon be buying the company for billions of dollars.The company ended up running out of money before ever going live.

The company I had left, despite the 300+ size, had almost felt like a family to me. OK, a somewhat dysfunctional family, and there were certainly some dilbertesque moments, but a family nonetheless. The company was not a technology company, and the software I wrote was just internal software to help run the business, and I had a blast doing it. I constantly had new things to learn and new things to try, and often told people that it felt like I was getting 2 years experience for every year I worked there. My decision to leave was based mostly on money, and turned out to be a pretty bad one.

Paul’s essay seemed very narrow-minded and provincial to me, like the local yokel that thinks that anyone with a different set of values than his own is therefore inferior. I thank Jeff for pointing that out. Most of the people criticizing Jeff seem to be agreeing with Paul that there is only “one true path to enlightenment”. That just seems a little too fanatical to me.

I agree with dhimes: Graham is a marketeer. In addition to the startup vs. prole article discussed here, he’s written other essays going on and on about the essential role VC money plays for startups. What does YCombinator do again? What a coincidence!

Jeff, give Graham some breathing room. To quote your own words:

“His essays … are among the best writing I’ve found on software engineering.”

You are not alone with this opinion. Paul Graham has become an institution, recommended reading by professors and clueful people
around the world. And rightly so, at least in my humble opinion.

So, lately he has produced some text of subpar quality. At least
that’s my perception and apparently that of many others.

I, too, found his recent essays quite self-centric, heck even
boring at times. All this Y-Combinator inside stuff, and “everyone should be a founder”-rambling gets old fast.

Still, even his weaker essays are still miles ahead of anything that I have read on your blog so far. Think hard about who you criticize for what and where you are standing. It’s very easy to throw mud at the idols but so much harder to recover the credibility that you may lose in the process.

My take on the recent Graham essays is that he’s maybe so focussed
on his Y-Combinator stuff at the moment that his writing gets a bit lopsided. Nonetheless, even the essay that you cite contains so
much unfiltered insight from “someone who’s actually done it”,
biased or not, that I can hardly understand how you get to
words like “irrelevance”.

Can you point me to another “self-made millionaire in the tech business” (for the lack of a better description) that freely
shares a comparable amount of insight into his thoughts and
findings with the world?

Heck, one that even shares fairly detailed information about
how he runs his current business?

Ofcourse you are entitled to your opinion and free to dislike
his writing. But please, use the big ammo (“irrelevant”, “self-absorbed”) sparingly. At least until you, too, have a few millions in the bank or written a few essays of world fame.

Thanks.

I don’t mind Paul Graham cheerleading for entrepreneurs, but I hate the cheesy effort to frame it in terms of evolutionary biology to get that patina of scientific credibility. This has been a problem for the theory of evolution ever since Herbert Spencer invoked evolution to “prove” the virtue of the English ruling class shortly after Darwin. Everybody invokes evolution to demonstrate that their particular spin on life is more natural then anybody else’s (and therefore superior). It’s usually done exactly as Paul has done it, with no real argument other then a plausible fable about human pre-history. In fact humans seem to have always adopted diverse strategies to get along in the world. Some people get along quite well in big hierarchical organizations, and some do better in small bands. This is also reflected among our primate brethren: male orangutans are solitary, baboons have elaborate troop pecking orders, chimpanzees have alpha males and females who dominate a band, and bonobo chimpanzees are filthy pan-sexual communists.

The most interesting part is your reaction Jeff…

Have you left home yet or are you still living with mummy and daddy ?

Ooh, more meta blogging and personal insults. Exciting.

I am right there with you Joel. I’ve been getting the same feeling as you describe from PG’s essays for some time now. Where once he was full of insights about human nature and software development, lately ever article is the same blather about why you should be doing a startup, and more importantly, doing the kind of startup he gets involved with, and doing it the way the guys he works with do it.

As for me, I like working for small companies. There’s a balance between autonomy and stability in being an employee at a company smaller than about 40. As soon as it’s big enough to factor out a middle-management layer and the founders aren’t my direct supervisors anymore, I start looking around for another one.

Also, working for yourself doesn’t necessarily mean doing a startup. Freelancing is an option that I’ve definitely looked into, that has the same kind of freedom PG talks about in the startup world, but which he conveniently, repeatedly, forgets to factor into these analyses of career options.

I’m also pretty sick of the youth-obsession in this business. Not everyone follows the assembly-line process of going right into college immediately after high school graduation and finishing in four neat, tidy years. I stumbled around several years figuring out what I wanted to do with myself before going back to school in my mid-20s to pursue a Comp Sci degree, started my first programming gig at age 30.

Sorry, submitted by accident before I was done… anyway, during those years, I delivered pizza, was a convenience store clerk, did construction labor, hung out with a lot of artist types, and most importantly was a “struggling” musician (if my “struggling” you can mean “poor but not concerned about it”). All those years, it turns out, I was learning about things: I ended up with a lot of useful perspective, experience and insight into how people collaborate, among many other things. A kid who went straight from mommy and daddy to the college campus to a “career” can’t claim that kind of background. I always tell kids about to graduate high school: if you’re sick of school, don’t bother going to college yet. Hang out and get to know adults for a while first.

For young, bright programmers, Paul Graham is on the right track. I worked for large financial companies and they hire people in their 20s and suck their souls dry. Heck, even working for Google now can be a lesson in bureaucratic entanglement.

Young people don’t have to worry about their family or whether the neighborhood schools are any good. They don’t have to worry what is covered in their health plan, or whether their 401K is any good. If things go south, you can always sleep on a friends couch and bum rides until you get your next big idea rolling.

So, as Paul says: Get out their and be prepared to fall flat on your face. Come out with an idea, watch it fail, then come back with another. Maybe you’ll never find the next great app. Maybe you won’t be a multi-millionaire by the time you’re 30. But, at least you tried. At least you got out there and got exposed to almost all aspects of development. At least you did meet a few who did make it. And, most important of all, at least you had fun.

When you get older, you get married and have kids. By then, your life is pretty much over. You can no longer think of yourself. Your family comes first. Now, you have to go to a big corporation and get one of those jobs with a health plan and 401K. Now, you have to have a savings account because your kids will drink it dry when they toddle off to college. I’m paying over $50,000 per year for mine right now, and it will only get more expensive as time goes on. At my age, a steady paycheck and a damn good health plan is extremely important. I also worry constantly about my pension and 401K. I may hate my job, but at my age, my personal feelings no longer count. It’s all about the paycheck.

Do you need to be a corporate founder as Paul suggests? I’d say a small unstable company that can go bust at any time with a good idea and cutting edge technology will also work. Someplace that treats you as if you are part of the team and not just another zombie employee walking through the front door.

When you’re young, you shouldn’t be looking for big companies and stability. The last thing you need is to work for a CitiGroup or Bank of America. You shouldn’t even be looking at a Microsoft or even Google. Go out and push an idea. You might fail, but whatever happens, you will be a much better developer because of it.

Nail on the head.

I stopped reading his essay about half way through. I got his point, “if you’re not young and haven’t started a company, you’re inferior to me and my friends.”

Suck it, Graham.

– A recent company found at the ripe old age of 36.

A lot of people will never be able to get past the employee stage but at the same time produce some great work. There have been countless management/psychology books written on this issue.

Its like putting a wild bird in a small cage. At first the bird will want to escape but eventually the cage represents safety, food and water. The behaviour of the bird in the cage is not much different to the employees in cubicals. A wild bird and a caged bird sing just as nicely as each other. The wild bird is far more interesting plus you don’t have to feed it.

Hmm…if we all follow Paul G’s advice then who would the startups HIRE?

Come on people, it’s pretty obvious Paul Graham’s essays are all advertisements for YCombinator. Same to say about Joel Spolsky and Fog Creek. (Though I’ll admit both authors are interesting at times).

BTW, I’ve worked in companies of 300,000 and I’ve been in the first 10 employees hired. I know now I’d never want to be a founder; you spend all your time talking to lawyers, marketing agencies and begging the customer. It’s like this: a great chef may not really have the chops the start a restaurant, because he’d rather be cooking than poring over the books.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED, PG would write an essay like that. Actually, I’m not. I’ve seen this movie before.

As I was reading “And it was startling how different they seemed”, I was expecting that to be followed “They smelled different, foul, … like Windows programmers.” Feel free to replace “Windows” with Java, that would apply just as well. So yes, I’ve read this type of essay from PG before. And I got tired of it and unsubscribed from PG’s feed a year ago.

Paul lives in his own little world, where the elite programmers (like his often referenced friend Robert Morris) use Macs or Linux and program preferably in Lisp or if they must, in Python. Those that don’t find this mold are stupid, ignorant and have no business being near computers.

PG is a decent essayist but what exactly makes him an authority on software engineering or programming? Yes, he has degrees from elite institutions. But what else? Oh yes, he wrote (in Lisp) an ecommerce app (Viaweb) at the dawn of the .dot com era, was bought out by Yahoo and become wealthy. Instant credentials. So what else? He’s been working on a Lisp derivative called Arc (how original,the world needs more Lisp derivatives) for years. Still not finished or usable yet. And he funds startups [that match his qualification, see above]. Has he had any hits, besides Reddit? Anything that changed the world? Or even close?

So why do we still pay attention to this guy? He doesn’t have a resume like a Linus, Dave Cutler, Guido, Matz, KR, Knuth, or someone who’s had a profound impact on our software engineering world. Hell, he’s not even DHH.

I guess that speaks more about us and lack of good soft eng writing out there. We’re desperate for someone who sounds like they know what they are talking about. But I don’t think PG is it. He’s as partisan and judgmental as Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore.

Jeff, I wish you wouldn’t have promoted him. But at least you called him out.

So let me see if I understand. Paul wrote a post from his own highly biased experience. This clashes with your highly biased experience, and you wrote a dissenting response.

So far, ok. I like Paul’s highly biased original opinion pieces, even when I disagree with them. And I like your highly biased original opinion pieces even when I disagree with them.

So I say to both of you, carry on writing highly biased original opinion pieces. What absolutely, positively sucks is when you take an original opinion and water it down with “your mileage may vary,” and “on the other hand many people believe X,” and so forth.

Forgo that pseudo-academic paper-writing/debating condescension. If Paul wants to write about how great it is to start a company using what he claims are powerful programming languages and you disagree, I would personally prefer that you write about how great it was to work for a company using MSFT tools without wasting so much as a word discussing Paul’s opinions.

But the last time I checked, I was not your employer, so I cannot tell you what to write. See how that freedom works for you?

Paul has written several posts that have pissed me off and I suspect that is why he wrote them. In this case I think he is making a point without a difference. At the end of the day, almost all of us work for someone. Looking back at my career I have to admit that at times I had more freedom and satisfaction as a W2 employee than I have ‘working’ for certain investors. The cage of a ‘founder’ is often gilded, but a cage nonetheless.

Where does Paul draw the distinction between founder and employee? If you are the 10th employee at a startup are you an employee? Or is that different? What about the 100th employee or the 1000th? At some point, if Paul’s companies are to be successful they will depend on the 100th employee. Getting your employees to think like ‘owners’ is key. Guys like Sam Walton were successful at making employees owners, despite the fact that his strategy didn’t scale (of course his business did).

I can tell you from experience that being the ‘founder’ isn’t as important as being the ‘owner’. Google and Microsoft have made hundreds of millionaires through distribution of ownership - there can be very few ‘founders’ of great companies, but their can be LOTS of owners. Working for a ‘big’ company while you are young can help you figure out what you want to do when you become an owner…